Posted tagged ‘Royal Photographic Society’

Avid readers of the blog will know that I was due to run a “Creative Eye” photographic workshop at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) HQ in Bath. Well, it’s happened and was very enjoyable!

We had a full group of 10, and they had a good range of photographic skill and experience. All came with a willingness to learn, and have fun while they did it. Here they are, photographed during the “creative use of camera shake” exercise…

Fenton House, the RPS HQ, has an excellent range of spaces, and lots of photographic opportunities. One of the training course exercises involved looking for textures and patterns, and we were spoilt for choice.

This shot of a Venetian blind is an optical illusion. It is rectangular, with parallel sides, but your eyes keep wanting to make the diagonal lines straighter, so the image edges start to look crooked. Try looking at it for a minute!

One of the exercises involved the group taking a “creative group photo”; this was hilarious. They arranged themselves on the floor of Fenton House’s exhibition space, and let their feet do the talking.

All in all I, and more importantly the delegates, thought the “Creative Eye” workshop went really well. We are planning to run this photographic workshop with the RPS again next year, so keep your eyes on the RPS website, or on our Training and Treks pages. http://www.lifestylephotos.co.uk/training.htm

Every now and then I have a “creative photography” day, where I try and push my limits and keep myself fresh. This week, on a really hot, sunny day with very strongly directional light, I took time to shoot some “Bokeh” images in the garden. “Bokeh” is derived from a Japanese word meaning fuzzy, and refers to the out of focus areas of an image. I often shoot portraits with lenses at large apertures to give nicely out of focus backgrounds; this gives good separation from the sharp foreground subject. The images I shot this week don’t have a sharp foreground subject!

Shooting “Bokeh” is a very interesting thing to do, as you can’t really see through the camera’s viewfinder what you’re going to get by way of a final image. The structure of the viewfinder screen can split highlights into spectral colours which don’t get recorded.

I’ve developed a technique that gives beautiful, abstract images with swirling shapes and colours. They are clearly not sharp in the traditional sense, but also don’t just look out of focus. The only manipulation this image has had is a bit of Auto Contrast in Photoshop.

This week also saw an excellent development regarding our photographic training courses. We are now running “The Creative Eye” as a workshop under the aegis (good word!) of the Royal Photographic Society on August 15th. Take a look at the relevant page on the RPS’s website here http://www.rps.org/workshops/view/1509